Saw this on a hand-lettered sign in one of the myriad Occupy videos and photos that have flown over my twitter the past few days. Sorry I can't find and link it. But the pithy statement "One person, one vote. Not one dollar, one vote." provoked me to review fundamental campaign finance, free speech, and what led America down the long dirty-politics road to Citizens United.
Scott Turow's 11/20 article in Bloomberg News contains a fine summary of Buckley v. Valeo, the US Supreme Court decision that infamously opened the door to campaign finance anarchy. Buckley elevated campaign donations to protected speech because they are used (in substance) to "buy speech." In retrospect, as Turow also suggests, this was a death blow to American democracy and the strong middle class that once made America economically vibrant.
The key thought error of Buckley was to assume that "buying speech" and "speaking speech" are functionally equivalent. Under Buckley and Citizens United, ordinary citizens speak in inaudible whispers, while the rich scream out their speech through an infinitely-loud media megaphone. But under the Buckley money-equals-speech view, that's fine because the law, in its majestic equality, allows the rich and poor alike to buy massive barrages of TV propaganda. Right.
You can't really comprehend the degree to which Buckley and Citizens United have demolished the foundation of American democracy, however, without also looking at the 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims, which established the principle of "one person, one vote." Before Reynolds, it was legal for a state to "gerrymander" a single large legislative district that wormed its way over all of the minority population areas, so that no matter how many minority voters, they could at most hope to elect only a single representative in the state legislature. Conversely, the gerrymanders would divide the rural whites up into multiple tiny legislative districts, each entitled to their own legislator even though they might have only a few voters. This process, which ensured that white legislators would vastly outnumber black ones regardless of population, was used in the South for many years to subvert voting rights.
Reynolds held that such biased district-drawing was unconstitutional, because the right to vote implied that all votes should have an equal impact. You can't stack the deck in advance so that some votes are worth more than others. In other words, "one man, one vote." (Now stated as "one person, one vote.") Doesn't this seem correct? And rationally fair? Of course it does. Voting is meaningless if some votes are 1/10th or 1/100th of other votes. You might as well just gather the 100 people whose votes get meaningful weight in a banquet room and let them select the candidate by acclamation.
But that banquet room is exactly what Citizens United foisted on us. Even though it's not explicit, Citizens United rejects the principle of "one person, one vote" and enshrines the opposite view that some votes can count much more than others. By allowing the amount of money available to be the sole and only arbiter of what campaign views get aired, Citizens United gives the 1% virtually all of the votes, while the rest of us have none. The 1% picks the candidates with their unlimited funds, picks what we get to hear about those candidates with their unlimited control of the media, and withholds funding from anyone who threatens their absolute dominance. As the sign said, we've gone from "one person, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote" in America, and the enormous predominance of dollars that the 1% control drown out every other political voice.
